The Book of the Play: Playwrights, Stationers, and Readers in Early Modern England (review)

In her excellent introduction to The Book of the Play, Marta Straznicky argues that we need a comprehensive history of early modern play reading. Maintaining that printed plays have too long been treated as pale reflections of their performed counterparts, Straznicky astutely notes why the readerly reception of plays was neglected: the New Bibliography paid attention to playbooks as "a species of print culture" but "took no interest in plays as reading material" (2). Much twentieth-century criticism took an "intensely literary approach" to the study of drama, "but its fundamental ahistoricism meant that the matter of what Shakespeare's contemporaries may have been doing with the words on the page was never raised" (3). The New Historicism overcame the earlier ahistoricism but focused on "the intersection at the level of content between writing and politics" and mostly ignored "the traces of cultural, commercial, and political contest that are embedded in texts as material objects, especially as books" (5). Thanks to important recent work on the text's historicity and materiality, it has become clear, Straznicky argues, that "the theater's impact on the public sphere . . . was conducted through two congruent but distinct media, the playhouse and the printing house" (7). While New Historicism did much to assess the impact of the first medium, we are only just starting a full exploration of the second.

Straznicky's introductory manifesto is compelling not only for its astute awareness of the work that remains to be done but also because of its survey of important earlier scholarship on "printing conventions for early modern drama," "elements of typographic design," "marketing of plays," "business practices of certain print shops," "the commercial context of play publication generally," "attitudes to play-reading . . . assembled from prefatory matter and from public and private library catalogues," and "the impact of print on advancing the authority of playwrights and the cultural status of drama" (5–6). Straznicky shows herself attuned to recent developments that relate to her project, notably, the "reassessment of the economics of play publication" (6) and work that has "demonstrated that . . . professional playwrights (including theater shareholders like Shakespeare) not only were not averse to seeing their plays in print, but also wrote plays with the intention of meeting the specific interests and requirements of readers as well as theatergoers" (7). Her introduction presents a convincing case that "we can no longer assume that play-reading was simply an extension of playgoing" (16).

The essays that make up the rest of the collection do not amount to the "cohesive history of play-reading" the introduction evokes—"an enormous undertaking," which "may well never reach completion" (5). I hope Straznicky is wrong. What many of the essays do provide are incisive case studies. They are divided into two parts, of which the first focuses on "Real and Imagined Communities," either actual readers who left documentary traces or groups of readers as they are constructed in the prefatory material of playbooks. Straznicky's and Cyndia Susan Clegg's essays turn to the latter to analyze how dramatists and publishers conceived of their readers. While Straznicky focuses on female readers and reveals an insistence on "the corporality of women play-readers" (60), Clegg's analysis suggests that readers of playbooks were aligned not with theatergoers in pursuit of entertainment but with readers of " 'serious' literature . . . intelligent and discerning," who "as co-creators of the literary dramatic text . . . possessed the capacity to assure the fame of playwrights, and to ensure their perpetuity" (35). Lucy Munro's investigation of early seventeenth-century readers of Edward Sharpham's The Fleer similarly reveals the gap between the play as book and the play as performance: whereas Sir John Harington bound up his copy of The Fleer with other play quartos in a stately volume, another copy of the same play shows theatrical alterations...